The original building of the Chopo Museum is a product
of late 19th century technology. The structure was manufactured
just before the turn of the century in Oberhausen, Germany, as a
pavilion for an exhibition on industry and art in
Düsseldorf.

After the exhibition, the structure was imported by a Mexican
company and reassembled in the neighborhood of Santa María la
Ribera in Mexico City between 1903 and 1905. The residents of this
once upscale district dubbed the building the "Crystal Palace" for
its resemblance to Sir Joseph Paxton's building for London's Great
Exhibition of 1851.

The German structure was long used as a museum of natural history
but was abandoned in the 1960s. Since then, it has been
appropriated as a space for performing arts, installations,
concerts, events, and film shoots, and now, administered by the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, it is at the center of one
of the liveliest art scenes in the city.

Photo courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

While the open, pavilion like structure lent itself well to
various uses, the museum proposed expansion and improvement,
particularly of the environmental controls, in order to meet
international museum standards. It was impossible to satisfy these
objectives within the existing structure; thus, the expansion is an
inserted volume with suitable mechanical systems. The original
pavilion is left untouched, serving as a shell around this added
volume and maintaining an almost documentary status as a vital work
in the institution's collection.

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

The dialogue between new and old ranges from self sufficiency to
mutual dependence. The structure of the insertion is entirely
autonomous, producing a series of ramped gallery spaces that fill
the old building yet barely seem to touch the ground.

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

The arched cast iron trusses of the nineteenth-century pavilion
are subtly reinterpreted in the glass facades and truss system of
the bridges and ramps in the new volume. The upper levels of the
ramps offer a view up to the iron lattices and wooden beams of the
soaring ceiling of the original building and down to the nested
gallery spaces. The expansion also includes auditoriums in a
below-grade excavation and a library near the roof.

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

Image courtesy TEN
Arquitectos

From the outside of the museum, the only indication of this
"invasion," which in fact doubles the building's area, is a small
portion of the insertion. This fragment extends past the outer wall
of the pavilion as a quiet reminder of its metamorphosis. In the
end, the original building remains intact yet is wholly altered by
its new occupant.